The benefits of a four-team bracket got us thinking: What if the current playoff structure had been in place before 2014? Who would likely have won the championship each year? (Would it have been different from the consensus champs of old?) And which schools would have gained — and lost — the most titles under a playoff system?

Let’s answer those questions. (If you’re not interested in how we’re answering those questions, skip down to the first table.)

First, we’ll need a way to determine which teams would have made the playoff each year. Unfortunately, over the first four years of the actual playoff’s existence, neither the AP poll nor our Elo ratings (which are designed, in part, to predict the playoff selection committee’s tendencies) have completely nailed the playoff field with their four highest-ranked teams going into the bowls. But a combination of both1 has been a perfect 16 for 16 in terms of predicting the real-life playoff teams.

So we’ll use that Elo/AP combo to pick the four playoff teams in each historical season.2 (Our Elo ratings can be calculated going back to the 1988 season, so that’s when our hypothetical exercise will begin.) I also found that, once the playoff field is set, the pre-bowl AP rankings alone have done the best job of matching the committee’s seeding for the teams, so we’ll set the seeds that way in our mythical playoffs.

Next, we’ll need a way to play out the theoretical playoff games themselves. For that, we’ll use Elo, which provides a probabilistic forecast for any given game based on the two teams’ pregame ratings. In most cases, we’ll use each team’s pre-bowl Elo ratings to give us the chances of each team winning both its semifinal game and the championship game (conditional on making it that far). The only exception is when a slated matchup happened in a real-life bowl that season, in which case we’ll use the actual result for that semifinal or final matchup.

A great example of this came in 2003, when both of our hypothetical semifinal games — No. 1 USC vs. No. 4 Michigan and No. 2 LSU vs. No. 3 Oklahoma — actually played out in the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, respectively. In that case, the Trojans and Tigers would automatically advance to the title game, where each would have almost exactly a 50-50 shot at winning the championship, according to Elo.3 At least one of these real-world matchups happened every year from 1988 to 2013 — except in 1989, when conference bowl tie-ins kept each of the four teams in our playoff field from actually playing one another.

After following all of the rules laid out above, here’s how each season since 1988 would look if a playoff had been in place instead of the system that was used at the time:

What 26 extra years of playoffs would have looked like

Hypothetical College Football Playoff fields for the 1988-2013 seasons based on Elo ratings and AP poll rankings

Playoff Teams w/ Championship Odds

Year

Team

%

Team

%

Team

%

Team

%

1988

Notre Dame

44

Miami

33

Nebraska

12

W. Virginia

11

1989

Miami

31

Florida St.

26

Notre Dame

24

Michigan

20

1990

Colorado

37

Miami

26

Florida St.

25

Notre Dame

13

1991

Miami

34

Washington

32

Florida

25

Michigan

9

1992

Alabama

44

Florida St.

23

Miami

18

Notre Dame

15

1993

Florida St.

48

Notre Dame

23

W. Virginia

22

Nebraska

8

1994

Nebraska

38

Penn St.

27

Florida

25

Miami

10

1995

Nebraska

53

Florida

18

Tennessee

17

Northwestern

12

1996

Florida

50

Nebraska

17

Arizona St.

17

Florida St.

16

1997

Nebraska

50

Michigan

38

Florida St.

12

Tennessee

0

1998

Tennessee

62

Florida St.

14

Florida

13

Ohio St.

11

1999

Florida St.

40

Nebraska

30

Alabama

24

Va. Tech

6

2000

Oklahoma

51

Miami

23

Florida St.

16

Florida

10

2001

Miami

46

Oregon

39

Florida

16

Colorado

0

2002

Ohio St.

39

USC

22

Georgia

21

Miami

18

2003

LSU

50

USC

50

Oklahoma

0

Michigan

0

2004

USC

51

Auburn

26

California

13

Oklahoma

10

2005

Texas

61

USC

15

Ohio St.

14

Penn St.

10

2006

Florida

42

Ohio St.

20

Oklahoma

19

Michigan

19

2007

LSU

33

USC

29

Va. Tech

27

Ohio St.

11

2008

Florida

62

USC

15

Alabama

13

Oklahoma

11

2009

Alabama

57

Florida

24

Texas

10

Cincinnati

8

2010

Auburn

56

Arkansas

19

TCU

15

Oregon

11

2011

Alabama

55

LSU

24

Okla. St.

11

Oregon

10

2012

Alabama

50

Stanford

20

Florida

19

Notre Dame

11

2013

Florida St.

40

Alabama

22

Stanford

22

Auburn

16

Actual champions (or co-champs) are listed in bold. In 1990, Georgia Tech was co-champion but is not projected to have made the playoff that season.

Playoff selection is based on pre-bowl Elo ratings and AP polls. Playoff games are simulated using Elo, except in cases where a matchup actually took place during bowl season (in which case the actual result was used). Certain teams are listed with a 0 percent championship probability because they lost a real-life game against a fellow playoff team.

Source: Sports-Reference.com

The good news for the old system(s) is that each year’s real-world national champ — or at least the co-champ — would be the favorite to win the playoff as well. (The only time a historical national champ didn’t make our theoretical playoff was in 1990, when Georgia Tech4 claimed the national title in the coaches’ poll but missed the top four in our rankings after entering the bowls seventh in Elo.) But the fact that the real-world champ tended to be the favorite in our hypothetical playoffs is no guarantee those seasons would have played out the same way: Even after including real bowl results when they happened, the championship favorite in any given year had only a 47 percent chance of winning the title on average.

The most uncertain year of our hypothetical playoffs might have been the aforementioned 1989 campaign; without any real-life bowls to help guide us, our system gives all four teams at least a 20 percent chance of winning the national championship. And among years that featured at least one actual bowl result to work with, the wacky 2007 season — in which playoff favorite LSU would have only a 33 percent of replicating its real-world championship — probably would have kept providing us thrills well into January. But with a playoff in place, many seasons would likely have had different endings than the ones we’ve set to memory over the years.

How different? Here are all the schools that would have made at least one playoff appearance under our hypothetical system,5 along with their projected and actual national championships won:

How a playoff would have changed college football history

Most FBS college football championships by school under a hypothetical four-team playoff system, 1988-2013

Hypothetical Playoff Results

Team

Appearances

Semifinal Wins

Champs

Actual Champs

Net Diff.

Florida

11

5.27

3.04

3.0

+0.04

Alabama

7

3.64

2.64

4.0

-1.36

Florida St.

10

5.38

2.59

3.0

-0.41

Miami

9

4.86

2.38

2.5

-0.12

Nebraska

7

4.03

2.08

2.5

-0.42

USC

6

3.60

1.80

1.5

+0.30

Notre Dame

6

2.87

1.28

1.0

+0.28

LSU

3

2.24

1.08

1.5

-0.42

Auburn

3

1.70

0.97

1.0

-0.03

Ohio St.

5

2.25

0.96

1.0

-0.04

Oklahoma

5

2.08

0.92

1.0

-0.08

Michigan

5

2.03

0.85

0.5

+0.35

Tennessee

3

1.09

0.79

1.0

-0.21

Texas

2

1.27

0.72

1.0

-0.28

Oregon

3

1.80

0.60

0.0

+0.60

Stanford

2

0.96

0.42

0.0

+0.42

Colorado

2

0.50

0.37

0.5

-0.13

Penn St.

2

0.84

0.36

0.0

+0.36

Virginia Tech

2

0.90

0.33

0.0

+0.33

West Virginia

2

1.05

0.33

0.0

+0.33

Washington

1

0.49

0.32

0.5

-0.18

Georgia

1

0.50

0.21

0.0

+0.21

Arkansas

1

0.36

0.19

0.0

+0.19

Arizona St.

1

0.40

0.17

0.0

+0.17

TCU

1

0.42

0.15

0.0

+0.15

California

1

0.34

0.13

0.0

+0.13

Northwestern

1

0.30

0.12

0.0

+0.12

Oklahoma St.

1

0.40

0.11

0.0

+0.11

Cincinnati

1

0.43

0.08

0.0

+0.08

Georgia Tech

0

0.00

0.00

0.5

-0.50

Total

104

52

26

26

+0.00

Playoff selection is based on pre-bowl Elo ratings and AP polls. Playoff games are simulated using Elo, except in cases where a matchup actually took place during bowl season (in which case the actual result was used).

In 1990, Georgia Tech was co-champion but is not projected to have made the playoff that season.

Source: Sports-Reference.com

Aside from Alabama, which won the most real-life championships (four) of the 1988-2013 era but would project to have about 1.4 fewer under a playoff system, every other school’s projected title tally is within about a half-championship of its actual count, playoff or not. The anti-Bama might be Oregon, who made only one BCS title game in the years we’re covering (losing to Cam Newton and Auburn in the culmination of the 2010 season) but would figure to make three playoff bids under our hypothetical system — and probably would have given Miami more of a fight than Nebraska did in 2001. All told, the Ducks would figure to have won 0.6 more championships with a playoff than under the actual system.

Over about 25 years, a handful of national titles is about the best you can do (see Bama’s four). So even a half-championship gain is a lot. And the more marginal differences further down the list matter, too. Imagine the effect on the fan bases at Oklahoma State, Cincinnati or Northwestern (!!!) if their teams had managed to get hot during the playoff and take home the championship. In general, you can see a pattern emerge in the table above: Under a four-team playoff, the long-term effect is to take titles away from many of the top programs and give extra chances to the next tier of teams. As counterintuitive as that sounds, given the way a program like Alabama has dominated the CFP since its inception, the addition of an extra semifinal game introduces more randomness to the system, which helps teams down the list.6

I once wrote that the BCS wasn’t any worse at picking champs than the College Football Playoff would be, and in a certain sense, that’s not wrong. (Again, the real-life champs each season above would have also been the favorites to win the playoff.) But the more we’ve seen teams get a chance to prove their championship merit on the field against top competition, the more appealing it is. Now I only wish college football had the current system in place for the past quarter-century instead of the confusing mismash of arrangements that preceded it.

Footnotes

Specifically, I added together a team’s rank in each list and re-sorted by that combined ranking, using Elo as the tie-breaker.

A more complicated version of this process might have involved using our full CFP prediction algorithm to produce probabilistic playoff odds for more than the top four teams, but we’ll save that can of worms for another day.

It may have also been easier for non-powerhouse teams to crack the top four in a given season during the previous era of college football, given that the teams making the playoff since 2014 have uniformly been stellar programs. Or maybe after four seasons, we still don’t have enough of a sample yet to know for sure.